An intelligent electronic prescription ontology framework for healthcare interoperability

Abstract

Lack of interoperability across healthcare systems has led to high medical costs, delays in healthcare service processes, significant medical errors, and more preventable deaths. Bernes Lee introduced semantic web technology in 2006 to enable communication between different systems and machines with well-defined meanings or semantics using ontologies. The advent of Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR) frameworks such as semantic Electronic Prescription (e prescription) has been a key turning point in the healthcare domain with the potential to solve healthcare interoperability issues. However, the existing semantic eprescription frameworks have significant limitations, including being proprietary, requiring installation, not web-based, lacking medical error detection and healthcare monitoring, being platform-dependent, incompatibility with other systems, and lacking robust framework evaluation. This research proposes an open-source Intelligent Electronic Prescription Ontology (IEPO) framework for healthcare interoperability to bridge the gaps in existing semantic prescription frameworks. A robust ontology development methodology called Methontology was adopted to develop ontologies for the stand-alone clinic and pharmacy healthcare systems to demonstrate their interoperability. Prescription medical errors like drug interactions are automatically detected during prescribing using Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL). Healthcare monitoring of vital signs is achieved and demonstrated using SPARQL queries. The proposed IEPO framework was evaluated for any ontology pitfalls regarding consistency, completeness, and conciseness. The results show that non of the ontology pitfalls were detected in the final ontology. IEPO was also evaluated for domain knowledge coverage via the corpus approach and performed 76% better than existing frameworks. IEPO also detected prescription medical errors with higher accuracy than related works. The proposed framework demonstrated seamless healthcare system interoperability between a doctor, pharmacist, and patient by accurately answering all competency questions using SPARQL queries. In addition, the IEPO framework is 12% more usable than related works, with an 87% usability score rating. The IEPO ontology is freely available to download online (shorturl.at/dqGY1)